ABSTRACT
What Quarles elaborated as being “an empty sound” and “the picture of a voice” in the first part of a poem denouncing people who put on airs to get ahead in the ways of the world, for Sidney would speak volumes about his life in art. For an echo, both as allusion and as aural conceit, aptly describes Sidney’s presence within and his relationship to his intricately spun pastoral romance. The idea of a picture of a voice, far from signaling nothing of importance, becomes in the Arcadia a way for Sidney to exercise his craft and which, like Spenser’s call to allegory, clarifies his stake in iconically extending language to exceed himself and to create a work that opened up the possibility of reflective transformation.
